Conservatives take a pass on CSE oversight bill

Offered a serendipitously-timed chance to mute criticism of expanded powers for Canada’s spy sector with a new measure of civilian oversight, the Conservatives took a pass Wednesday.

Bill C-622, the CSEC Accountability and Transparency Act – despite a single Conservative supporter – was defeated at second reading last night in a vote of 120-142. The vote came at as Bill C-44, a government that expands Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) surveillance powers, amongst other measures. The bill has drawn criticism for going to far at the expense of privacy.

The oversight bill, sponsored by Liberal MP Joyce Murray, targeted a different wing of Canada’s intelligence infrastructure, the Communications Security Establishment, or CSE. The bill wouldn’t change or limit powers for CSE, just add a watchdog committee. CSE, unlike CSIS, has no dedicated committee to keep tabs on it. Murray’s bill proposed a committee made up equally of members from each federal party that would keep an eye of CSE’s activities, issuing an annual report on operations.

Murray said she’d hoped for more Conservative backbench support on the bill.

“I was pleased that at least one Conservative voted for their constituents right to privacy,” said Murray.

“I hoped that more of the Conservatives would have voted for it because I had talked personally to probably seven or eight people who had expressed interest in having a better balance of privacy protection and security measures,” she said, information and telecommunications technologies have advanced swiftly, “the laws are frozen in place since back in 2001.”

“And they recognized this. They recognized the gap.”

Murray says she went to Conservatives who she knew as “defenders of civil liberties,” but none of the dozen or so she expected stood up.

In the end, Saskatoon-Humboldt MP Brad Trost was the lone Conservative to vote in favour of C-622.

“If there were more, it would have told me that it was a free vote and that’s what I was hoping for. The fact that it was just one suggests that it was a whipped vote and so he really stuck his neck out,” said Murray.